


hori-chan and kashima-kun

by patriciaselina



Series: let's go to a new frontier [5]
Category: Horimiya, 月刊少女野崎くん | Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun
Genre: Attraction, Brothers, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Male-Female Friendship, Meet-Cute, Siblings, Tumblr: horikashiweek
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-06
Updated: 2015-06-06
Packaged: 2018-04-02 12:02:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4059298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patriciaselina/pseuds/patriciaselina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>People like them simply did not interact. Did not have moments like this where even their silences were comfortable. It simply didn’t happen.</p><p>Not unless –</p><p>“Y’know what,” Masayuki hears himself say, without fully realizing the magnitude of his words, “You should wear your hair like that more often. Ditch the glasses, too.”</p><p>“Nn,” Kashima murmurs, noncommittally, wiping excess water off Takayuki’s rice bowl. There’s a dinosaur printed on the side, and it makes Kashima’s lips turn up into the most attractive smile – and Masayuki had <em>definitely</em> not been stealing glances at her all this time, no, no, he definitely has <em>not </em>been doing that. “I used to, back in junior high.”</p><p>(Hori-san and Miyamura-kun AU oneshot for HoriKashi week day 6: "Teamwork".)</p>
            </blockquote>





	hori-chan and kashima-kun

**Author's Note:**

> [horikashi week](http://patriciaselina.tumblr.com/tagged/horikashi-week) | 006 |  _teamwork_
> 
> I saw this series off [wolftempest](http://tmblr.co/m--NArX6JanbPwOOFMj_nIQ)’s twitter feed and couldn’t help myself, I guess. I’m using the same name I’m using for Masayuki’s little brother in  _Birdcage_ , if only because I am terrible at coming up with names, as you all know.

“Takayuki, welcome back –  _what the!?_  Why is your nose bleeding!?” Masayuki blurts out, crouching down to match his little brother’s height, turning little Takayuki’s head this way and that. Seeing the sheer amount of blood gushing forth, Masayuki’s golden eyes suddenly glint a bit more  _coldly_  – “Did anyone do this to you? Tell me who it was, I’ll make those sorry little brats apologize for being  _born_  –“

“U- _waaa_ , ‘ _niichan_ , it’s not like that at all! I just fell over,” Takayuki says, squeezing the hand of the person he’s holding onto, “And this kind  _niichan_  here helped me out!”

The first thing that comes to Masayuki’s mind is that – with their dark hair tied back and those brilliant green eyes, those high cheekbones framing that handsome face, the person who’d somehow gotten to helping Takayuki to his feet is well. Um.  _Hot_.

The second thing that comes to Masayuki’s mind is that he’s been staring at the handsome stranger for around five minutes longer than one is supposed to in polite company.

“C’mon in, please,” Masayuki says instead, praising his vocal cords for doing him well and not just breaking down and betraying him completely.

“Ah, no –” The stranger says, raising their free hand, a soft smile on their face. “I just came by to make sure that Takayuki-kun got home safely. I wouldn’t like to intrude on your hospitality any further.”

“But I insist,” Masayuki says, looking up at those green eyes again, suddenly struck by a wave of familiarity he can’t really place the source of. Has he seen this person before? Masayuki doesn’t think he has – after all, if he’d seen someone  _this_  damned attractive before, he doesn’t think he’d be able to forget it, not even for a moment. “It’s the least I can do for someone who helped my brother. Please, come inside and have some tea.”

“Well, then,” The smile on the stranger’s face is brilliant enough to knock Masayuki off his feet, and he would have done so right there and then, if only little Takayuki weren’t there to see his elder brother make a goddamned fool out of himself. “Excuse me for intruding, Hori-kun.”

It’s only after a few minutes after, when the tea’s poured out into cups and laid on the table between them, that Masayuki  _actually_  realizes what just transpired.

“Wait a sec,” he murmurs, first ensuring the fact that Takayuki’s long since busied himself with mulling over the jigsaw puzzle Masayuki got for him last week, before turning back to the stranger. Masayuki feels sweat beading on his brow, all of a sudden. “You’re right, I  _am_  ‘Hori-kun’, but...how did you know...?”

There’s a bunch of possible answers to this, after all, some of them being that this guy read their surname off the plaque above the doorbell, or that he was really listening when Takayuki, as Masayuki instructed, had rattled off his complete name, address, and elder brother’s phone number. But none of them are what the person in front of him ends up saying – rather –

“I’m in your class, Hori-kun. Have been, for a while now. It’s Kashima.”

–  _wait, what? The hell!?_

“...Kashima!?”  _Seriously!?_   Masayuki had almost always been seated near Kashima – alphabetical arrangement’s fault, most of the time – and from what little he did know about her she had worn her hair loose, almost aggressively hiding the planes of her face, and she wore a pair of what Sakura would’ve called ‘hipster frames’, presumably, to save the entire world from the blinding color of those eyes.

Those damn  _eyes_. How in the seven hells had someone  _that_  attractive spent such a long time being so  _close_  to Masayuki, and he hadn’t even been able to notice? And Masayuki internally agrees when Mikoshiba says he has a keen eye for beauty. Well, sitting here in front of Kashima –  _extremely handsome_  Kashima – Masayuki’s pretty sure he’s officially an idiot.

“You...ha, ha...don’t exactly look like the Kashima I remember,” Masayuki confesses, wincing at the nervous laughter that finds its way into his voice.

“You don’t look like the Hori-kun I remember, either.” Kashima says, her lips twitching behind the cup of tea she raises to her mouth. “Not with your hair down like that.”

 _Ugh, crap._  Masayuki flinches. Internally, of course. It wouldn’t do to embarrass himself in front of this one – in front of  _Kashima_ , damn it, who’s seriously spreading goddamned  _sparkles_  with how she’s keeping on smiling like that – by showing how annoyed he is at being so caught off-guard. There’s a  _reason_  why Masayuki always wears his fringe spiked up with hairwax when he’s outside, after all – because he’d been told that he looks younger,  _softer_ , somehow, with his bangs down, framing his eyes, and like  _hell_  is he gonna be mistaken for a kid any more than he already is.

Even  _Sakura_  hasn’t seen him with his hair down, for all that they’re pretty much each other’s best friend. So, yeah.  _Damn it._

“Is there something wrong, Hori-kun?”

 _Everything about this entire situation is wrong,_  Masayuki thinks,  _‘cuz you’re not supposed to be this heart-stoppingly handsome and I am not supposed to be this much of an idiot around you._  “Nothing’s wrong, Kashima. Nothing, really. Would you like to stay here for dinner?”

“Wha – but it’s already so  _late_ , I wouldn’t intrude on you and Takayuki-kun even  _further_  –”

“But I  _insist_.” Masayuki says, in a tone that brooks no argument (the same tone, actually, that he uses when Takayuki wants another ice cream cone hot on the heels of his second one), before turning back and smiling oh-so- _sweetly_  to his little brother. “Takayuki, I leave Kashima in your care. She is  _not_  to leave ‘til she gets to eat dinner with us, am I clear?”

“But – but  _Hori-kun_  –”

“Roger that, ‘ _niichan_!” Takayuki pipes back cheerfully, flashing Masayuki a grin and a salute before he drags Kashima to help him with his puzzle.

 _I guess actually seeing Kashima eat would finally convince me that she’s actually real and not just some kind of weird deranged fever dream_ , Masayuki finds himself thinking, before he goes back to the kitchen.

* * *

 

Kashima excuses herself into the kitchen as Masayuki’s washing the dishes – apparently Takayuki had fallen asleep watching TV with her, and she had decided to come and help him instead – and they fall into some kind of pattern soon enough. Masayuki washes the dishes, hands them to Kashima to dry them off and put them in the drainer.

It’s – comfortable, Masayuki guesses. He could get himself used to this.

Only – damn, he really shouldn’t. Who knows if Kashima would ever come by again, with her hair up or otherwise? In school, Masayuki was the cool  _senpai_ -type everyone liked to talk to, who wore his hair up and his tie loose and his uniform shirt an uncommon blue. Kashima, his polar opposite, kept her uniform primly buttoned all the way to the top, her tie fastened so close to her collar, and she kept to herself, minded her own business 100% of the time. So what if Kashima was a charming dinner guest, behind all her practiced silence and knack for distancing herself from everyone? People like them simply did not interact. Did not have moments like this where even their silences were comfortable. It simply didn’t happen.

Not unless –

“Y’know what,” Masayuki hears himself say, without fully realizing the magnitude of his words, “You should wear your hair like that more often. Ditch the glasses, too.”

“Nn,” Kashima murmurs, noncommittally, wiping excess water off Takayuki’s rice bowl. There’s a dinosaur printed on the side, and it makes Kashima’s lips turn up into the most attractive smile – and Masayuki had  _definitely_  not been stealing glances at her all this time, no, no, he definitely has  _not_ been doing that. “I used to, back in junior high.”

“What made you stop?”

“There was...an  _incident_ ,” Kashima says, the tone of her voice turning a bit  _pinched_ , all of a sudden. “Let’s just leave it at that.”

“...o _kay_...” Masayuki trails off, handing off a plate to Kashima and swearing to himself that no, his heart did  _not_  skip when their fingers brushed against each other. “Such a shame, though. You look  _good_  like that.”

Understatement of the century. It’s a shame Kashima doesn’t look like this all the time, all unself-conscious and totally sure of herself, ‘cuz when she’s holding herself so  _confidently_  like she has been this entire night, Masayuki thinks she looks  _gorgeous_. But like hell is he gonna tell her anytime soon. Actually, he wasn’t even supposed to tell her that he thinks she looks  _good_  in the first place...

“I should be the one who’s saying that,” Kashima says, the smile still resplendent on her face, “Because  _I_  think you look cuter with your hair down, Hori-kun.”

“–!!!”

“Ah,” Kashima says, green eyes blinking as she surveys the kitchen sink in front of them. “You dropped the plate.”

 _Way to say the obvious, genius_ , Masayuki thinks, bitterly, but he’s pretty sure there’s a pretty flush creeping up his cheeks anyway.

* * *

 

 

It seems as if a long time had passed since then. But still, here they are, in the same place as they were before – Hori residence, kitchen, Masayuki washing dishes and Kashima drying them, while Takayuki watches TV in the living room.

For all that Masayuki keeps thinking that this is an occurrence he’ll never have to get used to – Kashima comes by to visit  _all the time_. In the beginning she just runs into Takayuki and somehow gets coerced to stay for dinner. Then there are the times when Takayuki uses his puppy-dog-eyes on his elder brother and Masayuki reluctantly approaches Kashima to request her presence, telling himself  _vehemently_  that it means  _nothing_  that his insides feel all gooey upon seeing the  _smile_  Kashima would give him along with her response. Eventually he’s got her number on speed dial and he’d begun to have no qualms about having her around to help him with groceries, with fetching Takayuki from school, with – well, basically everything, really.

It’s gotten to a point where their mother had seen Kashima during one of her rare trips home and proclaimed that she considered her the Hori family’s third child, and then proceeded to congratulate poor Masayuki on ‘finally getting an A-class girlfriend’ as soon as Kashima left for the night.

Somewhere along the way Sakura and Mikoshiba had welcomed her into the fold, chatting with Kashima and including them into their friendly banter as easily as they would Masayuki himself. Masayuki’s not blind – he knows that their positive reaction to her hasn’t gone unremarked, that spending more and more time with them had made something in Kashima just  _shift_ , somehow – made her change the way she holds herself in class, a lot less timid and a lot more assertive, made her be comfortably enough to laugh and smile a bit more around them.

But not as much as she laughs and smiles around Takayuki, who loves playing games with her and calling her his ‘other  _niichan’_ , even around Masayuki himself, when he has his hair down and a tacky apron tied around his waist. Kashima just  _shines_  when she’s with the Hori brothers, for some reason, charming and completely in her element, and Masayuki has no clue why she chooses right here right now to be like this but it’s not as if he’s complaining. It’s like there’s a whole complete other side to Kashima that only he gets to see for himself, and – well, Masayuki would be lying if he said he didn’t like the sound of that.

“Oh, and by the way,” Kashima says, after a lull in their conversation that just ended a few minutes prior,  “I saw Sakura-chan earlier, when I was running off to the market.”

“Nn, I guess that’s what to be expected, what with her living in the area and all...”

“No, that’s not what I meant. I mean I  _saw_  her. She  _saw_  me. Like this.” Kashima mutters, waving a hand around the length of her body. It’s not supposed to be an open invitation for Masayuki to look at her, but – hell, he finds himself doing so anyway.  Dark pants, dark gray waistcoat over a dark purple button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows, hair tied back with only her swooping bangs left framing her face, black hipster frames nowhere to be seen. It’s the look Masayuki had gotten used to seeing on her, but if Sakura had seen Kashima like that...

“... _oh_.”

“I-it’s nothing!” Kashima says, waving her usual wiping cloth around in response to whatever expression she may be seeing on Masayuki’s face right now. “I didn’t even talk to her! So don’t worry about it, Hori-chan.”

“I’m not...exactly  _worrying_  about it, not really,” Masayuki mutters.

He passes her another plate, she dries it off, and suddenly, before he could think over his words any further, Masayuki hears himself say:

“I was hoping I’d be the only one who’d see you like that, though.”

... _what the hell, Masayuki Hori, the hell are you planning to achieve by saying that!?_

“Hori-chan...?”

“Nah, it’s nothing, it’s nothing, don’t mind me,” Masayuki says, well aware he’s scrubbing at the rice bowl with more strength than he’s supposed to unleash upon a poor innocent piece of china.

Kashima’s face turns up into another one of those soft smiles and it’s all Masayuki could do to not do something stupid as  _fall for her_  right there and then. “I guess I could understand what you mean. Kind of.”

“Really...?”

“How your hair looks really... _different_  when you get all that wax out of it. How you’re a great cook and are amazing at keeping house. How you love Takayuki-kun so much and do your best to make up for your parents always being away for work. How you don’t really care about looking ‘cool’ when you’re here at home. How you’re  _hella_  strong, and how you even slung me over your shoulder like a sack of potatoes when I said I wanted to buy you that princess costume for your birthday –”

“ _Kashima_ ,” Masayuki says, his voice low and  _dangerous_ , because everyone who knows of the princess costume incident (so just him, her, Takayuki) knows that they should  _not_  talk about the princess costume incident, with fear of death. Through Masayuki’s  _own hands_. “What is this all about, you friggin’  _brat_  –”

“–I also want to be the only one who’d be able to see that,” Kashima says, and is it just a trick of the goddamned light or is Kashima fixing that fond gaze on  _him_ , of all people? “I want to – it feels like this time of your day is just for me, and I. I want it to stay that way.”

 _Does she even know what those damned words of her are doing to me?_  Masayuki thinks, feeling his cheeks go warm, all of a sudden.

Earlier that day, when they had gone to fetch Takayuki from school together, Takayuki taking one of their hands each and clasping them with his own, one of the mothers from the kindergarten said that Masayuki had made ‘a handsome couple’ with his ‘lovely friend’, and Kashima had merely laughed in return.

He – he wants things to stay this way too. With Kashima, by his side, always by his side, through everything – no matter if it’s Takayuki’s tantrums or school gossip or homework or, or basically the rest of his entire life.

Problem is, though, Masayuki knows exactly what that way of thinking means.

So he nods, his cheeks still damningly warm, and doesn’t say anything more. If he ends up leaning more into Kashima’s warmth while they continue washing dishes – well, neither of them say anything about it.

what the hell, Masayuki Hori, the hell are you planning to achieve by saying that!?

**Author's Note:**

>  Casting goes the Hori siblings=well, the  _Hori siblings_ ; Kashima=Miyamura; Sakura=Yuki; and Mikorin=Ishikawa. Yes. This means that we have  _another_  Mikorin>Hori/Kashima thing on our hands, people. (Spoiler alert: I’ve been informed that, this casting in mind, the endgame would be eventually HoriKashi and MikoChiyo so...yeah!?)
> 
> Aged Masayuki down a notch so he’d become classmates with everyone, but I guess that was already obvious.


End file.
